I am unaware of an English translation, so I attempted a translation myself. (Any professional translators out there with a better version, please let me know!)

Note on translation: a curiosity.

Serbian has a tiny coordinating conjunction word a, which often translates to either the English (cumulative) conjunction and, or the English (adversative) conjunction but, depending on the context. Here’s an example:

Dan je, a mračno je napolju.

means

It’s day but it’s dark outside.

Dan je, a to znači da ne može napolju biti mračno.

means

It’s day and that means it can’t be dark outside.

Serbian also has the equivalent of the plain, old and, which is given by another single letter: i.

Have you always wanted to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but never found a way to get started? No? Am I helping when I say it’s 600 pages of narrative poetry in Latin written in 8 AD and that it covers the myth and history of the world from the beginning to Julius Caesar? Oh and it influenced Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. There, if that didn’t convince you that the following quote — which is not from Metamorphoses — is relevant, I don’t know what will.

Quote: The gods are invoked or they initiate. They are the intermittent forces, applied at the end of the lever, with a mortal at the fulcrum on whom a myth turns.

This is a line from A. S. Kline‘s A Honeycomb for Aphrodite, Reflections on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It’s a reasonable, easy-to-understand, 120-page book. It doesn’t claim to be an introduction to the subject matter, but it can give you an idea of what to expect. Also, the author has published his own translation of Ovid’s poem into prose (in the same book). Instead of struggling through meter and stanza you can read in full sentences a sweet little summary of its contents.

However, if you wish to indulge in a beautiful translation, after much internet traipsing, I’ve concluded (possibly incorrectly?) that this translation by Allen Mandelbaum is poetically the most satisfactory.

Quote: The pasture pond was unruffled but had the prickly surface caused by raindrops, and it seemed bereft without geese. The sky was a gloomy grey. Two rosebuds bowed courteously to each other on the terrace.

A vivid few sentences by E. B. White in his essay, Eye of the Edna, from the book Essays of E. B. White. He is describing his farmyard before Hurricane Edna struck New England in 1954.

On metaphors, quotations, and the continuity of literature, while the world and the times change. From one of the best books about books, A Reader on Reading, by Alberto Manguel.

Metaphor builds on metaphor and quotation on quotation. For some, the words of others are a vocabulary of quotations in which they express their own thoughts. For others those foreign words are their own thoughts, and the very act of putting them on paper transforms those words imagined by others into something new, reimagined through a different intonation or context. Without this continuity, this purloining, this translation, there is no literature. And through these dealings, literature remains immutable, like the tired waves, while the world around it changes.

Quote: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Another opening line of a novel, this time from Neuromancer, by William Gibson. The Quote sets the mood and era of the book accurately. Mood: gloomy. Era: television. Try writing a metaphor about a dead television channel for generations born in the complement of the twentieth century and you’re in trouble. (Year of publication: 1984.)

Incidentally, Neuromancer got the Cyberpunk literary genre going; William Gibson was the first to use the word cyberspace in a 1982 short story, and in Neuromancer he actually gives the definition: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators … ”

Quote: But I remembered how it felt to be a thief. It felt like living in a room without any windows. Then it felt like living in a room without any walls.

In Find a Victim(1954) by Ross Macdonald,we hear this thought of the main character, private detective Lew Archer as he is witnessing an interrogation of a thief. He tells us his own experience in two well-crafted sentences of parallel structure.

You have settled down next to a window, a night lamp, or a tablet. You have turned to the first page of a book, and …

Quote: Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.

This is the opening sentence of John Banville’s The Infinities (2009). Even though the blurb, the book cover, the book reviews, the comments from friends and social media sites and the kitchen sink may have had their say by the time the poor reader reaches this sentence, it is still the starting point of the author’s tale. And what a starting point!

What makes the Quote quiver?

Suppose we’re discussing a quote, and I refer to a figure used to embellish an otherwise trite piece of writing. Am I being lazy in not calling it a figure of speech? Or am I applying a figure of speech (synecdoche, perhaps) to the phrase “a figure of speech” to get a shortening?

It may be a bit of both, however, it also looks like figure — meaning tricks of the rhetorical and linguistic trade — was used in that sense first, and that the expression a figure of speech came later. This is what some internet-and-book hopping has thrown up.

The word figure has many meanings. The particular sense used in figure of speech is found under number 21, in section V, of the entry for figure, n.

V. In various uses, representing the technical applications of Greek σχῆμα.

21. Rhetoric.

a. Any of the various ‘forms’ of expression, deviating from the normal arrangement or use of words, which are adopted in order to give beauty, variety, or force to a composition; e.g. Aposiopesis, Hyperbole, Metaphor, etc. Also, figure of speech.

Indeed, searching for figure of speech redirects to this entry.

The Greek word σχῆμα refers to form or figure. The earliest of the examples given in the OED under 21.a comes from Chaucer.

To reproduce or repeat a passage from (a book, author, etc.); to repeat a statement by (a person); to give (a specified person, body, etc.) as the source of a statement

We live by cultural conventions and social norms, by the promises we give and are given, by the rules of nature. When they are broken, we know, because we can quote the particular article of faith that has been broken.

“I said … “

“You said … “

“He said … She said … “

“It said …”

But what makes a statement worth quoting?

That it conveys meaning or information, that it is memorable or ingenious, that it is pretty, pithy, or that it pierces the very heart of some — any — truth.

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